Thanks to the more than 500 of you who came to one of the WebTrends Connect seminars during our 7-city US tour over the past three weeks.  Aaron, Barry, and I had a great time representing WebTrends and connecting with you.  Many thanks as well to our partners Teradata, Stratigent, and Rosetta for speaking along with us at the events.  All three are leaders in their respective fields and it was our pleasure working with them. We know they share our sincere appreciation for all of you who took time out of your busy schedules to spend with us. 

We enjoyed sharing our approach of integrating web analytics throughout your organization and examples of how you can accomplish this today with your WebTrends products using our ODBC driver, web services, and the new data scheduler in On Demand.  We hope that you not only learned from the presentations and discussions during the morning sessions, but were able to get some one-on-one time with members of your WebTrends account team that day.  More importantly, hopefully you made some connections with other attendees – some who share the same business challenges that you regularly face.  As I say to anybody who will listen, if you get the chance meet up with others - do it! Whether that meet up is in an online forum, user group sessions, Web Analytics Wednesdays, or other events in your area, you’ll be amazed at what you can learn.

Speaking of learning and meet ups, please join us in April at our WebTrends Customer Conference at the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.  We’re going to focus on providing the insight and instruction you need to get maximum value out from your web analytics.  And we’ll have some fun too – after all, it is Las Vegas.

Thanks to the more than 500 of you who came to one of the WebTrends Connect seminars during our 7-city US tour over the past three weeks.  Aaron, Barry, and I had a great time representing WebTrends and connecting with you.  Many thanks as well to our partners Teradata, Stratigent, and Rosetta for speaking along with us at the events.  All three are leaders in their respective fields and it was our pleasure working with them. We know they share our sincere appreciation for all of you who took time out of your busy schedules to spend with us. 

We enjoyed sharing our approach of integrating web analytics throughout your organization and examples of how you can accomplish this today with your WebTrends products using our ODBC driver, web services, and the new data scheduler in On Demand.  We hope that you not only learned from the presentations and discussions during the morning sessions, but were able to get some one-on-one time with members of your WebTrends account team that day.  More importantly, hopefully you made some connections with other attendees – some who share the same business challenges that you regularly face.  As I say to anybody who will listen, if you get the chance meet up with others - do it! Whether that meet up is in an online forum, user group sessions, Web Analytics Wednesdays, or other events in your area, you’ll be amazed at what you can learn.

Speaking of learning and meet ups, please join us in April at our WebTrends Customer Conference at the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.  We’re going to focus on providing the insight and instruction you need to get maximum value out from your web analytics.  And we’ll have some fun too – after all, it is Las Vegas.

Thanks to the more than 500 of you who came to one of the WebTrends Connect seminars during our 7-city US tour over the past three weeks.  Aaron, Barry, and I had a great time representing WebTrends and connecting with you.  Many thanks as well to our partners Teradata, Stratigent, and Rosetta for speaking along with us at the events.  All three are leaders in their respective fields and it was our pleasure working with them. We know they share our sincere appreciation for all of you who took time out of your busy schedules to spend with us. 

We enjoyed sharing our approach of integrating web analytics throughout your organization and examples of how you can accomplish this today with your WebTrends products using our ODBC driver, web services, and the new data scheduler in On Demand.  We hope that you not only learned from the presentations and discussions during the morning sessions, but were able to get some one-on-one time with members of your WebTrends account team that day.  More importantly, hopefully you made some connections with other attendees – some who share the same business challenges that you regularly face.  As I say to anybody who will listen, if you get the chance meet up with others - do it! Whether that meet up is in an online forum, user group sessions, Web Analytics Wednesdays, or other events in your area, you’ll be amazed at what you can learn.

Speaking of learning and meet ups, please join us in April at our WebTrends Customer Conference at the Red Rock Hotel in Las Vegas.  We’re going to focus on providing the insight and instruction you need to get maximum value out from your web analytics.  And we’ll have some fun too – after all, it is Las Vegas.

The sun is out, a few clouds dot the sky, and crisp fall air fills my lungs as I loop Portland’s Willamette river between the Hawthorne and Steel bridges. Lactic acid nips at my quads and my calves threaten to revolt with strain, but there are lots of things to distract me from any weak points in my will.

The Shins’ Split Needles in to my ears from my iPod, dodging pedestrians, timing walk signals just right, the freighter Morning Star loading grain in to it’s holds near the Steel Bridge, all this visual data keeps me from giving in to the urge to turn around and walk to Red Coach for a juicy burger.

Another data source is my Nike+ Sportband. This new bit of technology has revolutionized my runs with data. It is amazing how the right data at the right time can be incredibly compelling. The Nike+ Sportband uses a sensor in your shoe to log pace and distance and then plugs in to your computer to upload stats to the Nike+ web site. The impact on my running was instant.

When I am just about to hit the wall I look down at the wristband. It reads, “2.91 miles” and I think to myself, I can do 3 miles easy! My run ends almost a mile later, well over 3 and a half miles. During my run, pace data spurs me onward. Glancing down, I notice my pace has dipped so I accelerate. I also notice my pace increases when I am near other runners giving me insight in to what motivates me.

When I get back to the office I upload my stats to my Mac. A lot of other Nike+ runners talk about this like it is a reward or goody. This is certainly true with me. Seeing my runs over the course of a week and comparing them really makes my day. It makes me want to get out there again and fill up that week with more stats. There is even a little Nike+ Mini avatar that reacts when I run or don’t run. Seeing him bummed out makes me want to get for a run.

The User Experience team at WebTrends is passionate about creating this kind of experience for our customers. We are exploring ways to visualize and deliver data in a way that provides the compelling insight you need to optimize your route, pick up your pace, and keep you going for that extra mile.

Once you have WebTrends implemented, you will likely find yourself, or someone else in your organization (perhaps even several someone’s), pouring over the data to determine if it’s accurate. Ideally, this testing and validation stage takes place before you start distributing the data internally and in a development or staging environment. That gives you time to address any potential issues — missing tags or forgotten filters — and put forward the best quality data right from the start.

But not everyone has the luxury of a testing environment or the time to do it before deployment. Even if you do, your testing environment may not match your live site exactly, or perhaps something was simply overlooked. These things can lead to data that is less accurate than you had hoped, quite apart from the inexactitude that plagues any form of web data. The problem is compounded further when you are moving from a different measurement tool all together, or moving from log files to client-side tagging. These factors combined can result in data that varies widely — sometimes shockingly so — from what you were expecting. And that means you could lose internal credibility, making it even harder to get the resources and attention you need.

Here are a few steps you can take to mitigate these risks and ensure that you not only capture the best data possible, but that you can distribute it confidently.

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One of the best parts of my job is talking to customers about their current business challenges.  Most of them agree that the age of one way online communication is dead.  Website visitors no longer want to be talked at, they want to have online conversations.  These conversations take a number of types, but blogs are currently the most prevalent and popular form.

Sometimes organizations undermine their own blogging efforts by treating it like any other communication medium.  Sure, blogs can still be used for one way communication, dumping information on the visitors without allowing a reasonable means for them to respond.  However, truly successful blogs are the ones that engage users in a dynamic, on-going conversation.  If you want to take your blog to the next level, you must commit to encouraging that conversation.

It’s not that difficult to take that extra step and get your readers excited about your blog.  It’s basic human nature for your visitors to want to contribute their thoughts and add their voice to the marketplace of free ideas.  Sometimes a visitor believes he can add to the conversation and sometimes he simply wants to disagree.  The standard blog commenter interaction model is illustrated below.

If a visitor contributes to the conversation, he is much more likely to return to see other visitors’ replies.  Then he may post again or read new content, raising the frequency of his visits, as well as his overall level of engagement.  The trick is to inspire users to move from being passive readers to active contributors.  This is the point where standard web analytics metrics break down:  knowing what content visitors are looking at is only half the story.  We need to see both sides of the picture.

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Years ago, I had a career-broadening experience as the WebTrends admin and analyst for a large company. I was quite literally a one-woman show. We had WebTrends implemented, and while our software needed some tweaking, we were actually getting far more data already than we honestly knew what to do with. My internal clients weren’t sure how they could turn that data into action, and my managers didn’t see how visits and page views could tell us anything useful beyond the fact that the web servers were up and running. There were also many doubts about the validity of the data. I had hit the second hurdle that many of our clients have difficulty overcoming after a year or two of owning our product — “We’ve got it implemented, now what do we do with it? Can we trust the numbers? How do we manage this over the long term and make it valuable to the enterprise?”

Truthfully, I suspect this is the point in the customer life cycle where many of our clients slip away to our competitors (and vice-versa). After having invested time and resources into implementing their web analytics solution, they still aren’t reaping the full value of their investment. What they need is far beyond simple implementation, even a very good one; what they need is a plan for using the data they have to drive continuous improvement and to optimize their web site as a marketing channel. What they need is help in weaving data-driven decision making into the very fabric of their organization and fostering a culture of continuous improvement powered by data. That is a much taller order than simply installing some software or adding some JavaScript to a web page, but the impacts can extend far beyond the web channel.

Over the next few months, I will be returning to this topic again and again in a series of blog posts that discuss the challenges of becoming a more data-driven organization–including things like validating data accuracy and interpreting WebTrends reports correctly–techniques for overcoming those barriers, and best practices to help your organization move beyond that second hurdle.

I’m hoping these will be bi-weekly blog posts, at the least, and I hope you will all join the discussion.

With decreased forecasts for economic growth – your boss, clients or even the CFO might be asking “Is now the time to reevaluate marketing budgets?

When the economy slows, there are generally two approaches to marketing spend: cut in lieu of other areas of the business, or increase to fill the gap left by competitors cutting their own spend. Branding spend is usually the first cut made (before direct response), but other factors include: Cost (up-front and ongoing investment), Short-term results and Trackability.

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Welcome back and thanks again for all the comments on the first post in this series. So without further adieu….

You Need More Detail – Just consider for a moment the landing page. It’s very common to set up a landing page to receive the visitor when they come in from an email or a banner. The landing page may include various elements from navigation to images that attach to links to a box that collects emails. Sure you can tell the Marketing Team that a 1000 visitors came in from a banner and 200 went on to purchase. Very helpful information, but through a comprehensive interview you may discover that the Marketing Team also wants to know how many visitors clicked over to find out more about the product.

They may want to know how many routinely return on the 7th day and purchase. This level of information can help them to modify their marketing campaigns to include an email blitz on the 5th day that will drive an even higher number of return visitors on the 7 day mark. You won’t know how detailed to set up the tagging and reporting if you haven’t gotten into the minds of the stakeholders who intend to utilize that information and it’s through these steps that you get there.

Education? It Might Be Needed- This is true for setting up Content Groups, I’ve seen real messes with reporting because the company set up a Content Group without really understanding what the stakeholder intended to get out of them. This in turn left them frustrated that they aren’t getting the information they were looking for. If they had taken the time to first understand what the Content Group is meant to do and then determined what it is they wanted from data, they could have easily got there.

These Steps May Help – Rather than go into every last detail (although I’ve covered a lot) of what I think is core to Business Requirements Gathering - let me leave you with a few helpful steps to get you started.

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Attended the Web Analytics Association (WAA) webcast this morning, caught up on what the Standards Committee has been working on and reviewed the updated definitions being proposed for 2008. Great discussions from the panelists following questions posed from the audience.  One of the new inclusions in the standards document is “Ask Your Vendor” questions, which highlights areas where calculations are done in differently across analytics solutions. We’ll be keeping an eye out for the final version of the scenarios referred in the webcast and in Angie’s interview with Eric Peterson this week, so we can provide our answers and/or approach.

The document will remain in a draft state and open for comments until December 31, 2008.  Until then, we are publishing our compliance with the current WAA standards for WebTrends Analytics 8.6 (releasing over the weekend). As mentioned in the webcast – you can find the same from other solutions providers: Dennis for Yahoo! IndexTools, Justin (from EpikOne) on behalf of Google Analytics, Greg for Mobiliytics and Akin from Unica ( who released their comparison this week along with the request that all analytics providers “not shy away from revealing how their solutions comply” ).

We provided this mapping of our definitions this past September for an upcoming CMS Watch report and it follows the format that Dennis did earlier in the year.

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